I am enjoying being the Learning Expert for a very innovative programme (Learning and Knowledge Development Facility) that aims to promote, capture and share learning from a series of international public private development projects (PPDPs). The objective is to create a platform and a process for sharing learning among all the project stakeholders and with other interested parties for continuous improvement in the existing projects and to create efficiencies in future project development and implementation.

For this project, among other things, I recently wrote a series of How-To Manuals (see the blog post: How to Write a “How To” Guide: Two Approaches to Creating Reusable Learning) based on individual learning gathered through interviews and collective learning from facilitated workshops and meetings. These detailed documents are all available for practitioners in the project to use as well as anyone else interested.

But, they range from 20 – 30 pages, with some shorter executive summaries that aim to distill further key points. With piles of reading already on their desks, the project managers challenged us to create some new, shorter learning products, not just for them but for their colleagues and others who were interested in the project, who wanted to learn more, but were just starting to dip their toes into it.

The project is about developing Public Private Development Partnerships (I’m not going to describe them here, you have to watch the video!) It’s quite a nuanced concept. And because of the complexity of writing about and describing the PPDP approach itself (one of my long How-To Guides was about PPDPs – How to Develop and Implement a Vocational Training Public Private Development Partnership – even the name was long!) that was where we decided to start.

So we made an animated video – a 3 minute 23 second explanation of what PPDPs were, how they worked (and of course the benefits!)

All in all, it took us four weeks from the telephone interview that produced the narrative, to receiving the link to the final video. We chose an aggressive time frame as we wanted to show the video at an upcoming meeting. For this project we worked with Simpleshow.

This was my first experience working with a creative team to create an “explainer” video. There were a number of lessons that I learned along the way that I want to capture, for my own future reference, and also for sharing with anyone who is tempted toward the process of condensing and sharing learning in 4 minutes or less.

Lesson 1: What’s the message?

As I mentioned above, the idea started with a 33-page “How-to Manual” which structured a rich multitude of lessons learned by many different actors. How on earth could that be condensed into 4 minutes or less? Four minutes was the upper limit given to us by Simpleshow, with a suggestion that even this could be too long. (Note: There is plenty of interesting research done on video length and viewer attention span – like this article by Powtoon Explainer Video: How Long Should Your Explainer Be? We went plenty over, relatively speaking, what seems to be a generally suggested time limit of 1-2 minutes.)

It was obvious that this amount of content was far too ambitious for a 2-4 minute video. So we needed to think again. When we considered the questions that come in about the project, the first ones and perhaps the most fundamental are really the basics – What is a Public Private Development Partnership? Who is involved, how does it work and what are the benefits? In answering those questions, our message is really basic: This is a very cool approach which you should know about and might want to get involved in. So we started there. You really need to be crystal clear about the central message you are trying to convey. Too many messages make for a messy animated video.

Lesson 2: What’s the story?

For a video to be good, there needs to be some kind of clean and simple story or narrative with some characters, a challenge that people are trying to solve together, a barrier to surmount. Our story had all of those components. To get to the essence of the story for our video, Simpleshow sent a questionnaire with some very good questions along these lines. We answered it and sent it back and then set up a call with a project manager and a story writer that lasted about an hour. I discussed with them the answers to the questions – What is a PPDP? Who’s involved? What makes it special? What problem is it trying to solve? And they asked more questions, and I gave more answers. After a while it formed into a simple but compelling story.

Lesson 3: Whose voices? Which characters?

If you watch many explainer-type animated videos, you will notice that there is almost always one voice that is the narrator. This voice introduces the characters, and effectively tells the story for them while they move around and animate the story. (More on this narrator voice later.) As such there are a lot of decisions around characters and voice in a video. First, you need to identify your characters. Our first list was very long as there are a lot of important actors in PPDPs. But you really can’t have too many characters as it can be hard to keep track of them and in some cases hard to tell (animated) people apart. Remember that they are not distinguished by their voice, as they do not speak – one central voice tells the story, so they need to be differentiated in other ways.

In our case, the main actors involved were actually organizations, as we were describing an approach or a process. So we had to decide which organizations were the most central to our story, and what characters would represent them. We ended up with four main characters with actual names (Peter, etc.), and with some minor characters without names (e.g. teacher, government official, other student).

You do need to be thoughtful about names – selecting those that are not too similar. For names we tried to use known names from where our characters originated; the most important name choice was our central character, a woman graduate in Zambia. For that I researched the most popular female names in Zambia and decided on Thandi, which is near the top of the charts of popular names for women in Zambia, For next time, I would suggest even more diverse names for the other organizational characters as the project is international. We changed a couple of them from those suggested by Simpleshow, which was perfectly fine with them, but could have changed them a little more to capture the true diversity of the project.

Lesson 4: Getting the story crystal clear

The next step was to write up the narrative – the story as told by the narrator. This was the script and was written from the perspective of a storyteller which was not one of the characters. The script was drafted based on our telephone conversation. Simpleshow wrote out the script. word for word, exactly as the narrator would read it, and sent it for review along with some ideas of visuals (in words) and potential images that could accompany them (characters, icons, etc.) I checked the accuracy of statements, changed terminology, answered some questions, and looked for points of emphasis.

It was important here to remember that some words can be very politically charged, how some characters are described can be consistent with their own terminology or quite incorrect. You need to remember that you are the expert at the topic, the video maker works on a myriad of different themes and although they do their best, it is your responsibility to catch things at this stage. I shared my comments with colleagues to make sure that I was not missing anything, and indeed I had! At this important script stage we needed to sign off on the narrative as written, because it is not efficient or practical to change the text after the images are drawn.

Lesson 4: Sketch stage – Choosing the right images and icons

I considered what was being suggested in terms of images and iconography and made some tweaks. Sometimes the initially proposed icons might not be quite right to represent the actor – for example, a technical assistance donor will not resonate with an image of a bag of money, but with a growing plant instead. Other images benefit from changing to increase accuracy or authenticity. For example, I changed an image that was represented on a chalkboard to make it more consistent with the reality of the project (from a flow chart to an engine diagram as the project works with heavy machinery), or changing what one of the characters was wearing to be more like that we see in the vocational training centre workshops in the project.

For this, I used photos from our project, and also googled factories in Zambia, and sent links to the animators, and generally tried to help make the story and images as accurate as possible with the reality of the project. It was at this point also that I received a first sketched of the characters. For Thandi, our Zambian main character, I commented on her dress and hair, and googled lots of Zambian universities and factories for photos to see what students were wearing. Although I have been to Zambia on more than one occasion, I wasn’t in a heavy vehicle vocational training workshop! So I passed this by colleagues who had been working in Zambia, and had been to the vocational school until we all agreed. All the images need to be checked carefully for accuracy and authenticity as again, it is practically impossible to change them (or very costly to do so) once the voice actor is engaged and the animation completed. You definitely don’t want someone watching the video a month after production saying, “That’s not how you pronounce ‘Thandi’ in Zambia”!

Lesson 5: Voice actors – What voice best matches the content?

Speaking of pronunciation…the video narrative will be read by a professional voice actor (I enjoyed googling that fascinating field of work). The company has a pool of voice actors and sent me some audio clips to listen to, and from which to select the one that seemed to fit the content best. I found out from the company we worked with that most animated videos they made were narrated by men, and often with American accents (at the request of clients).

We decided early on that we wanted a women’s voice, so the Simpleshow sent through some female voice clips for me to listen to, with some different accents. It was interesting to hear all the varieties of voices, and their different qualities, intonation, brightness, etc. We decided that we wanted a British female voice. I listened to a few more audio clips and chose one. The voice in the original clip I found a little too bright and chirpy, which didn’t fit as well for our content, so I made some suggestions along those lines. When the actor recorded it she matched our request and instructions.

Lesson 6: Signing off final stages – no going back

At this point I had signed off on the text to be narrated, and I needed to sign off on the images and icons, and what would happen to them which was described in words (wondering, searching, happy, ‘wiped away’). I was asked about how to pronounce ‘Thandi’ ( with “h” or without – I double checked with a Zambian friend to be sure!) Also how to pronounce ‘UNIDO’ ( spell it out or read it.) It was great that they asked, I am sure the voice actor needed to know. Again this is something you might anticipate and give some instructions before the voice actor does her work.

At this point, the text and images go out of your hands and the company puts together the animation and the voice actor records her text. You can listen to the final results in the video above!

We would ideally have liked another review step or a quote for how much that might cost (it might be significant if the voice actor needs to re-record something to emphasize a word more or less, or a sequence in the middle of the video needs to be re-shot). I understand that is why there are so many opportunities for iteration and sign off steps. It is however still challenging to try to imagine how the voice will work with the images, and how the images will move. There can be unconscious messages communicated when some images stay longer on the screen or have a more central place in the viewing pane. In the future I will try to pay more careful attention and try to anticipate this, and thus give some additional instructions to the artist and voice actor on this aspect if needed.

What might happen next?

The video launch received a very enthusiastic response and good feedback. People are thinking actively about how to use it. The team recently translated it into French as one of the new PPDPs is in a Francophone country. That took only 2.5 weeks, from request to final French-version of the video, and provided another broad set of possible accents and specialised terminology to select from (with no changes made to the animation except the last ‘thanks’ page).

The video has been put on the webpage and shared widely with partners. It will feature in an upcoming training course on PPDPs in the introduction, and is being sent to potential partners through email and in workshops and meetings. It is such a short and easy introduction to PPDPs, and is much more engaging than any PPT slide set or oral introduction, both of which would take longer than 3 minutes 23 seconds.

Overall, it was a very exciting and fast paced process, and it’s fascinating to see ideas move from a conversation, through written words, to images and then jump off the page into an animated video. And it is not as mysterious as you might imagine. I enjoyed writing down my learning and things I want to remember, not least because I might want to reuse my learning in the next set of animated videos that are already in planning!

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Fotolia-2Bvideo-2.jpg346346Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2015-11-03 17:00:002016-12-22 15:35:13Condensing Learning into 4 Minutes or Less? Making a Simple Animated Video for a Complex Project

When your story is a powerful as UNHCR’s Vincent Cochetel – of his 317 days in captivity near Chechnya as a hostage chained to a bed, in darkness but for 15 minutes a day of candlelight and able to take 4 small steps and no more – simply the facts can have a profound influence on listeners. But when you tell it as eloquently and powerfully as he did at the recent TEDxPlaceDesNations, you have a message that sears itself into the memories of your audience.

If you have 20:44 minutes, watch his talk, “Attacks on Humanitarians are Attacks on Humanity“. Listen to the message and see if you can keep a dry eye. It’s a beautifully told story of a captive, an object in a political struggle, that makes himself a human being in the eyes of his captors, an act that ultimately makes it easier for them to free him. It’s told in a quiet way – an example of storytelling of the very best kind in my opinion, and humbling to watch. I was sitting in the second row of that grand hall in the Palais des Nations in Geneva for the event, and his talk gave me an immediate sensation of the humanitarian work that goes on within the United Nations system (I worked there myself for a few years, although, as a young professional, I was in a big building in Geneva far from the reality that Vincent speaks of).

Watch him take his 4 small steps, light his candle for that 15 minutes, and speak in the hushed tone of a captive. His words transport you – you’re there in that small room with him. You might find yourself, as I did, wondering how many other humanitarian workers throughout the world right now are in captivity still waiting to see daylight again, and what more can be done to help them.

I recently took over the role of Table Topics Master at our Nyon Toastmasters Club, a role I had not taken before (Note: If you don’t know about Toastmasters, I would highly recommend this wonderful learning community focused entirely on public speaking.)

Table Topics are a regular feature of our Club, and I think of all Toastmasters Clubs. They give people the opportunity to stand up and deliver a 1-2 minute speech, completely impromptu, about some topic that they are given on the spot. These are in contrast to the prepared speeches at each Toastmaster meeting (which are longer, prepared in advance of the meeting and practiced, practiced, practiced.)

I wanted my Table Topics to give people the opportunity to tell a good story, and when I looked around, in early June, I noticed a lot of body art being displayed with the nice weather. So I decided to call my Table Topics:

WHY DID YOU GET THAT TATTOO?

When you see a really unusual tattoo, you know there must be a good story behind it. So I took 8 slips of paper and on each one of them I drew a tattoo (in some cases I made it on PowerPoint, or I typed it out if it was words/numbers, or I found a similar image on the internet). Then I wrote on what part of the body the tattoo was positioned. I folded up the slips of paper and put them in an envelope. On the night I asked the volunteers to select a piece of paper and hand it to me, so I could describe the tattoo, where it was placed and ask them in a rather loud and demanding way, “Why Did You Get That Tattoo?” (of course you can vary the tone of your voice depending on the tattoo – you can sound like your mother or an envious friend.)

Here are the “tattoos” that I used (not all of them were selected – we had time for the first four):

55⁰01’N 82⁰56’E – The map coordinates of Novosibirsk are tattooed on your left foot – Why did you get that tattoo??

A small Chinese character that looks nice but translates into “Noodles” on the nape of your neck

“Jane Forever” tattooed across your back

An outline of the State of Texas on your calf (pick any state/country)

“Only Judy Knows” tattooed on your right bicep

Lampyridae (the scientific name of a firefly) on your ankle

A bar code on your lower back

Half a Tweety Bird on your thigh – Why did you get that tattoo??

You can really use your imagination on this as the Table Topics Master, and obviously it demands the same on the part of the speech makers!

We had some wonderful stories about a well-lubricated project site visit in wintery Siberia, indelible life-changing field work with Jane Goodall, some translation difficulties in a tattoo parlour in Shanghai, and a Dallas University Professor who really made a lasting impression on his student. The Table Topic speakers were so creative and rather courageous I would say – congratulations to the four Toastmasters women who jumped at this opportunity before we ran out of time.

Delivering good Table Topics is also one of my personal learning edges. I feel comfortable (appropriately nervous of course) preparing and giving a 5-6 minute prepared Toastmasters speech. But the idea of having to talk off the cuff, sensibly, about a topic I am given 2 seconds before is still something that makes my brain race, legs shake and voice quiver. And although I thought about it in advance, I am still not sure how I would justify that half a Tweety Bird tattooed on my thigh.

In the learning field, especially when the approach is learner-centred, we talk of the “learning journey” that people go on as they build their capacity/understanding/competency in a new area. We may also use the words “learning narrative” to describe this learning process to others.

It’s interesting to think how a learning practitioner builds his or her ability to design a compelling learning journey. And I wondered today how storytelling and story writing might help us…

If you look at the structure of a story and that of a learning process (let’s take a week long workshop for example) you might find some of the same steps along the way.

Where a story might introduce the characters at the beginning, in a learning course you would introduce both the participants on the learning journey (e.g. other learners in the room), as well as the issues that will be playing a big role in the week.

After introductions, you might have some time to get to know the characters, including their backstories and ambitions. In a learning workshop you might at this stage have some group development exercises to help people to get to know more about their colleagues, and also go deeper together into the issues and themes of the workshop. As in a good story, all would not be described in a linear or obvious way; you would discover interesting new things, facets and added complexity, as you read. In a workshop it could be the same, new aspects of the theme would be uncovered as the group digs into it and adds their own different perspectives to it (e.g. through group discussion and work, rather than only presented through straight lecture format).

Then, just when you get comfortable (hey, I get this stuff!) there needs to be a challenge – some tension in our story (and our learning) – what ever will our heroes do?!

(And of course there might also be some antagonists – in workshops they call themselves “Devil’s Advocates”:-)

Our challenge may be a real community challenge-like transboundary water conflict or unsustainable fishing practices – to which the workshop participants, with the community members, are trying to contribute some thinking. It might be a learning case study to solve together or a U-process that helps them reflect on a problem, perplexing issue or an unhelpful paradigm. At this point in our story, and our workshop, as we try to overcome the challenge, passions and emotions may be high – can we do it?

Yes we can! (At this point the ending of our story may be personally biased, I tend towards resolution and happy endings, and I think that learning environments often benefit from the same). In our story, this can include that ending summary that we see when the characters get together and talk through what happened (like at the end of Secret Seven books or Scooby Doo episodes). In our workshop it may be a final report back on the conclusions of the group work, presented to the community or to each other. This could be followed by a collaboratively built summary reflection on what happened and what people learned, and some final words.

In stories, as in learning, there are lots of interesting ways to make the narrative exciting for the reader (and workshops for our learners). Unusual and complex situations and scenarios (who gets the land: the farmers, villagers, foresters or loggers?), thought experiments, seeing things from different perspectives, excellent questions, incredible backdrops (I once held a learning workshop on a beach in Thailand, at a wastewater treatment plant in Morocco, and a mountaintop in northern Mexico) and more.

So, where can you find insight and inspiration for the design of your learning narrative? Read any good books lately?

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2012-12-04 16:15:002016-12-22 15:35:14Can Good Storytelling Help You Be a Better Learning Designer?

I’m currently working with a team on a number of 2-hour workshops that will be held at an upcoming international conservation congress in September. For one of the workshops we will feature 6 speakers sharing different approaches to working with their supply chains.

We will be using the Ignite format for their presentations and every presenter I have spoken with so far has been keen to try this, although they realise that the format is a little more challenging for them than the traditional PPT slide set that you control yourself.

I was asked by one presenter to share why we thought this format was a good choice, so I wrote up the following short description and rationale for why Ignites are great for conference presentations:

Ignites started in 2006 in Seattle, Washington, supported by O’Reilly media, and focused in those early days on helping the technology industry speakers “ignite” their audiences with new ideas, but in 5 minutes bursts. With the slogan “enlighten me, but make it quick” it rapidly caught the imagination of other conference and event organizers (both within the tech industry and beyond) as a way to feature many people, and thus many ideas, in a reliably short period of time.

The format of an Ignite is 20 slides auto-timed at 15 seconds each, which is similar to the Pecha Kucha format (which is 20 slides auto-timed at 20 seconds each). Pecha Kucha’s also came out of industry, launched as it was by presenters from the design industry in Japan, earlier in 2003.

These are powerful formats for conference settings as:

They focus the speakers on a strong narrative line and key messages (avoiding going off message and in different directions during their talk);

The format keeps the speaker to time, as the slides are auto-timed in advance meaning they change automatically during the presentation. This also means that all speakers have the same time allocation, and the last speaker doesn’t get squeezed by the time transgressions of the first speakers (we’ve all seen it happen).

It means you can have, with confidence, more speakers and ideas, which allows for greater information exchange, as the talks are guaranteed to be short (after the last slide shows the screen goes black and its obviously over);

It sets up a reliable pace for the audience, so they can relax into the 5-minute segments (even with many speakers) knowing that the presenter will stick to time and the essential points. They also know that if one presentation is bad, then it is only bad for 5 minutes and not for an ideterminable time period. This goes a long way in conferences to enhance audience enjoyment and engagement.

These are just some of the reasons we will be using Ignites in our conference sessions, and why this format is a strong choice for this!

I have written some other blog posts on using both Pecha Kuchas and Ignites, and what makes them good. If you’re interested:

I won this gnome two years ago, a prize selected by my cousin who was organizing our annual Ohio family reunion. It was the gift for the family member who had travelled the furthest, and as I had come from central Europe, I easily won this award, and she knew I would. She had picked this piece of tchotchke for both me and for herself; our sensibilities were similar, and this Travelocity gnome reminded us of how far we had gone from our own farmtowns in the Midwest. She herself had lived in the UK for many years and had often contended for this title, and today…

If someone saw this gnome in a second hand shop, it would be no more than a piece of useless plastic, probably not weather proof so not even a garden variety gnome. However, with a story its value changes. But don’t take my word for it.

I was fascinated recently by a Studio 360 piece called In Search of Significant Objects, which told of a social and anthropological project which “demonstrated that the effect of narrative on any given object’s subjective value can be measured objectively”. That is, that an object had more value when there was a story attached to it.

I have seen this myself at a recent house moving “giveaway” party, where a friend of mine was downsizing to a smaller apartment and laid out all the things, clothes, vases, belts, shoes and assorted stuff that she needed to give away. She invited a dozen or so friends and colleagues over to take things away. Initially some of the best things went; however, an enormous pile of objects was left until she started to pick things up one at a time and enthrall us all with their origins, with stories of travels to hard to reach places, special gifts from visiting dignitaries, traditional dresses worn at historic events, and made in secret moments of important meetings by the personal tailors of powerful people. Almost everything went, and with each item, the story of its origin and provenance which was now complemented by the new owner’s own story of where she acquired it, from a remarkable woman who had already lived 40 lives.

The Significant Objects project proved this too. Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn conducted the experiment by buying unwanted objects at thrift stores, for an average of US$1.25 a piece, then invited writers to create new backstories for each object and then sold them all on Ebay, for over US$8000. You can see some of the objects – from candle holder, Fred Flintstone Pez dispenser, craft doll, to a jar of marbles – and read the stories on the Significant Objects website. ( An odd and somehow beautiful little story about the jar of marbles that gives the artifact a completely different meaning increased its value for a new owner from $1 to $50 dollars.)

I am curious about these findings in terms of what they can bring to learning and my work, I am not quite sure yet. Will people find knowledge and information, or your work or ideas more valuable when there is a good story behind them? I guess the best speakers know that. Will people value and remember the things we give them (both physical and conceptual) when we join their well-crafted origin stories to them? If we stopped and thought about our own stuff and stories, would we throw away less/buy less meaningless stuff?

I’m not sure how much I would get for my garden gnome, but now, remembering its story, I want to keep it.

I have often found myself making reference to the ideas of Nancy Duarte. She spoke to me and a group of TEDx-ers on a pre-opening backstage tour of TED2011 early this year about storytelling and presentations that “Resonsate” – the title of her recent book. In my blog post “TEDxWorkshops, Talks, Tips and Tweets…” I recalled my tweets from her talk: Nancy Duarte on storytelling formula: What is – what could be – what is – what could be – what is – call for action – the utopian new bliss. / Nancy Duarte quotes Ernest Hemmingway: “The first draft of anything is shit.” / Nancy Duarte quotes Woodrow Wilson: “If I have 10 minutes to present I need a week to prepare; if I have an hour I am ready now.”

I have since quoted these myself many times when working with people preparing presentations, and am delighted to say that I just today discovered this short video of Nancy giving much the same talk. Watch it. And once you’ve done so, look at the links on the webpage under the heading ‘Extended Web Content’. Here you can click through to examples of how the formula applies to talks – including by Benjamin Zander, Ronald Reagan and Feynman. I think these are very useful to see it in practice, and trust that you too will find this a great resource for thinking about your presentations in the future. Let us know how you get on!

Watch this 8 minute video taken at the recent TEDx Tokyo which features Junko Edahiro, Chief Executive of Japan for Sustainability, answering the question about what motivates young people today. She introduces 3 “De’s” – trends which she observes to be forming a big part of the value set of young adults today (much to the consternation of their elders).

De – ownership (from owning things to sharing things),

De-materialisation of happiness (from happiness in buying things to person-to-person/nature),

De-materialisation of life (happiness in our own lives without the lure of the monetary economy),

For the latter she talks about young people who are half farmer/half something else (musician, NGO leader, etc.). These people combine growing their own subsistence food needs with their mission-driven work – instead of investing all their time climbing a company ladder, climbing a ladder to pick apples instead. Junko talks about Japan, can these same trends be spotted elsewhere in the world?

Junko provides thoughtful examples, challenges us all to think about our own possibilities to “De” our life, and welcomes us to the Era of “De”!

(Note from me: Junko is a terrific speaker, fellow Balaton Group Member, and friend and I am delighted to see TEDx and Junko connecting their considerable talents in this way.)

As we frequently use Pecha Kucha’s and other presentation techniques, I thought I would share this great video of Scott Berkun giving an Ignite (5 min presentation – 20 slides autotimed at 15 seconds each), on the topic “How to Give an Ignite”. His lessons are terrific and his engaging modelling of the technique itself in giving the tips just makes it even better.

I found this video through Anecdote‘s blog which featured a post today (or yesterday or tomorrow – I am never sure which since they are based in Australia) titled Scott Berkun encourages storytelling. Have a look at this interesting musing on the storytelling aspects of Scott’s presentation.

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2011-02-07 12:47:002016-12-22 15:35:15So You’ve Been Asked to Give an Ignite or Pecha Kucha? Scott Berkun on “Why and How to Give an Ignite Talk”

I am currently working with a team focusing on biodiversity conservation and assessment to “makeover” an existing training curriculum into one even more interactive and learner-focused. As a part of this process I offered to put together a selected list of resources, from the raft of those available, that are particularly useful to me in this kind of work.

As trainers, capacity developers, learning practitioners, and facilitators we have before us a veritable sea of interesting tools, techniques, and even toys that have been developed to help make our events successful and enjoyable (yes, we have discovered a learning space where we can have fun and learn at the same time!)

Because this sea is vast, we each have our own parts that we prefer. And our selection of what we bring with us may be different every time – we might dip in and out, or we might dive deep into one area or another. It’s always varied, to keep both us and our co-learners fully immersed and engaged. What follows are some of the places I go to find inspiration (many I have written about on this blog and in these cases I will link up the posts or the tag).

Of course I always approach an event from the point of view of its learning objectives. Once those are clear, how you achieve these is an exercise in building an agenda or process that will, as much as possible, bring people out of their everyday discussions into a vibrant learning zone. Try…

Discussion and Co-creation TechniquesThere are so many wonderful tried and tested techniques and processes available now with which people are getting more and more comfortable (facilitators and participants). I’ll list a few of these here along with some of the blog posts we’ve written about our learning using them. What is also intriguing, once you get really familiar with them, is to mash them up! This helps them be even more suited to the particular needs and interests of your group. Among these is Open Space Technology, developed by Harrison Owen which has a whole community (OpenSpaceWorld) of connected users (see: Opening Space for Conversation (and Eating Croissants)). We have enjoyed learning about and using World Cafes (see: Our World Cafe: Kitchen Table Conversations for Change), and this methodology has also gone global with a useful website (TheWorldCafe) full of its own tips and resources. We have built numerous Conversation Cafes – into our sessions (instead of holding them in cafes). These are slightly different than World Cafes – they are hosted and build conversations without people moving tables.

Specialisations to AddStorytellingTo a good interactive learning base, you can add some special features to your event (warning: with too many it starts to become full sensory overload). The selection also depends of course on your goals and objectives. What about Storytelling (see: My Point? To Be a “Story” there Must be a Point)- story circles, featuring cases as stories, etc. Anecdote from Australia has a wonderful website showing how you can “put stories to work” and a good newsletter by the same name. Check out their learning White Papers for interesting applications and how to’s. We also have a tag on Storytelling on this blog.

Improv Comedy and TheatreI love the idea of adding Improv comedy or Theatre activities, especially if you are working in leadership, presentation, conflict resolution, teambuilding or just to spice things up and get the group thinking more creatively. I have been to a couple of Improv Theatre application workshops and have experimented with adding this to events (try to go further than role play.) (see: People Buy Adjectives). John Cremer gave an excellent workshop at last year’s European IAF Conference on using Improv and his website gives more ideas about how to use it for creative thinking and presentation skills learning. If participants need to give presentations as a part of their learning event, why not start with a little interesting improv training on this?

Visual FacilitationThere is a great deal of nuance here around graphic facilitation, visualisation, graphic recording etc. which I lump together as “visual facilitation”. The bottom line is that real-time visuals are created to capture the discussion and activity threads of your event. (see: Making Memories: Improving Your Impact Through Visualisation, Slam Poetry and More). We have worked with a Danish-based group called Bigger Picture, who are members of a larger, global Visual Thinking community called VizThink. We have contributed to visual murals at Society for Organizational Learning Conferences, worked with cartoonists at several IUCN events, all with great results, tapping into visual learners, and giving an extra dimension to our work. Visual facilitation works best when time is given in the session to have participants co-creating, developing personalised icons and talking through what is being visualised.

Through this process you will “Learn how to speak agenda” and will be able to both design for interest and impact, and also to write up your agenda like it was a menu at a restaurant. Think of yourself as a diner, if you got this menu (agenda), would you want to eat at this restaurant (or attend this workshop?)

And Finally (although I think this beach is endless)…A recent book by the World Bank called The Black Box of Governmental Learning, which I am reading right now (download it for free from their website), starts with an interesting history citing the progression of learning in this domain -governmental- although I find it widely applicable from my experience. It talks about the change from expert-driven learning which is lecture-based with limited interactivity, to the newly evolving paradigm of learning with each other. The tools and techniques that I list above can help makeover a learning event from a one-way teaching model, to one where everyone jumps into the topic together.

Such a long list might seem indeed for a trainer or facilitator like jumping in at the deep end yourself, and yet you can wade slowly into this sea of interesting learning tools and techniques, until you find your own favorite place(s). Good luck! Fellow trainers and facilitators, please add your favorites in the Comments section below!

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2010-10-20 18:25:002016-12-22 15:35:15Swimming in the Sea of Learning Resources

What do you notice when you have the opportunity to watch 35 Pecha Kuchas? We have featured these interesting presentation techniques – 20 PPT slides autotimed at 20 seconds each – in different workshop settings in the last few months. Here are some of the things we noticed that made them work:

13 Tips for Pecha Kucha Success

Practice your Pecha Kucha WITH the timing turned on (don’t just talk through your printed slides to yourself as “practice”.)

Check particularly how your message for each slide matches the 20 second timing limit.

Too much information? Think about where you need to break down your message if there is too much information for 20 seconds. For example, run your message over 2 or 3 slides if need be. Think creatively about how your visual can progress with your message development.

Too little information? If you find that there is too little for 20 seconds, e.g. just a one liner or one brief point, then double up two messages on 1 slide, or think about a quick example to illustrate your short point. Note: Watch that the example doesn’t launch you into a long story which will blow your timing.

Using diagrams? These can be a good way to snapshot lots of information but be careful with diagrams or graphs that are too complex. Can they be recrafted so the one key message/line/box is bolder? Note that people will not be able to read the little stuff (like all the indices etc.) quickly, so only include what you need for your story. Spread it over 2 slides and use a build. Make a handout for later if people will need the detail, don’t try to go through it in your Pecha Kucha.

Save time by not using the first slide to introduce yourself, the title of your talk only, or closing with a “Thank you for listening” slide. Just say it quickly. If you want to elaborate on yourself, use a wordle (beautiful word cloud) of your CV or bio to snapshot yourself (here is an example of one I did for myself).

Watch your computer positioning – make sure the computer is in a place where you can see the screen as a prompt and still face the group, unless you have good peripheral vision and can stand at the side so you can see both the screen and the eyes of your audience.

Never NEVER read your slides.

Design thinking – I have seen both slides with only images and no text, and slides with an image and a prompt word. Unless you are very good at picking images and they are very obvious (even quirky can be obvious within your narrative), I think I like the latter. The single word can summarise the point of the image. It is also very effective to only have one or two words on a blank slide (centred or interestingly placed), and perhaps with a black or colour background. In any case, mix itup!

Interactivity? It is hard in the time allocated to do very interactive work with your audience – you can use hand mapping or voting, or other quick inputs, but if you have to pick on people and wait for an answer, and then if people talk too long, there goes your timing.

Part of a Pecha Kucha marathon? If your Pecha Kucha is one in a string of PKs, then the organizers might want to pause for a minute (literally) between them and invite people to write down any thoughts, questions, or comments before starting the next one. The organizers could even make a Job Aid of some kind (a card with a matrix, etc.) to help people keep track of where they are in the line-up and their impressions.

Getting people’s attention – If you do want to engage, then end with a “lesson” unconcluded; with a question, or an invitation.

Don’t apologize for “not having enough time to go into depth because of this format”; that just says you didn’t prepare well enough.

Everyone should be able to make their point in this day and age of micro-media with an “elevator speech” – and 6 min and 40 seconds is an incredibly generous elevator ride by most building’s standards!

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2010-08-14 11:00:002016-12-22 15:35:16Taking the Long Elevator: 13 Tips for Good Pecha Kuchas

This morning I went to an interesting Writer’s workshop on publishing – it ran the gamut from traditional book publication to online self-publishing. It reminded me of some of the things that I had learned doing this myself, which I had never recorded. So before I forget, I thought I would blog this experience for my own future reference, and anyone else interested…

A few years ago I published a book for my father, who had written a novel for a niche market, using one of the better-known self-publishing companies at the time, Xlibris. There are plenty of these online services now, in addition to this one, such as Virtual Bookworm, Lulu, iuniverse and so on. I won’t bother to compare them here; if you are interested in an overview of what’s on the market check out the Incomplete Guide to Print-on-Demand Publishers which includes up-to-date prices, packages, royalties and services for over 50 self-publishing companies.

Today this is a real option for authors; and an opportunity that can have a steep learning curve along the process from taking a manuscript in Word through to a book that you can hold in your hands.

What I would do the same next time:

Use the editing service: I managed to get a special that included editing in the print package price, and although I had edited it myself thoroughly once, and had another external editor lined up, I decided to try Xlibris’s editing service. It was really excellent – I could not believe how many glaring inconsistencies there were in the text, from names to spellings. The editor was first rate, no doubt from sheer volume and experience, and I was delighted to have used their in-house service.

Personalise the cover: For the book cover, I asked a friend Chris Gould who is a professional photographer and photo-montage artist to do the design. Because I knew him well, and he knew my father, the author, it took only a couple of brief conversations for him to come up with a wonderful design, something that would have been hard to convey using a template or to explain to an anonymous designer.

Get the text as complete as possible BEFORE sending it to the company: I spent many hours reading, checking, and editing the document before I sent it into the Xlibris machine for layout and formatting, etc. Because the original document was in Word, I could easily spell and grammar check, print and proof it. As a result, I didn’t have to worry about slowing down the process with this once it started with the publishing company, which was full of other unanticipated tasks, such as writing up the dust jacket texts, the online descriptions, author bio, summary (short, medium and long), etc.

What I would do differently next time:

Watch the retail book price: Because there is no stock kept for POD books, and because of the cost of printing small quantities each time, the retail price of these books is high compared to traditional publisher prices. It can be up to double the price, for example, what might cost US$8.99 in paperback in a bookshop, might cost around US$15.99 as a POD book (even when you order it in a bookshop). This is fine for a real niche market, or a textbook/coffee table book, but it is high for a regular fiction paperback that is trying to compete for general readership.

At Xlibris you have a choice to bring down the retail price, and of course it is at the expense of your royalty (e.g. you can take it down to US$1.00, but no less). Depending on your goals for the book – from just getting it out there, to actually making money from it – that can affect your choice of publisher, or your decision to publish at all. The cost to the author of self-publishing is around US$500 – US$1000 (with some less and many more costly). So, if you are even out for cost recovery, at US$1 royalty per book, you still have to sell between 500-1000 books to break even. Note that the average book sales for POD books is under 200 (some information on sales statistics here)!

Layout and page count: I would pay much more attention to the page count, and related to this the font size and margins. There is a cut off point for printing related to pricing and I had not paid enough attention to this. The book ended up with smaller than normal margins, that were obviously designed to get more words on the page, to have less pages, and therefore cost less to produce. This turned a normal size book into something that looked more like a novella, which ultimately makes it even harder to sell at the higher prices.Plan better marketing in the first year: It is normal to think that in the first year, with a little advertising the book will sell itself (and it does to a certain extent); however, that is just the time to organize the biggest advertising push, including all the social media tie-ins that are available to authors these days. After the first year, some of the shine comes off, and the book becomes one of the Long Tail titles that can still pull in some sales, but less and less as years move on.All in all, I would still self-publish, the experience was good enough. I would probably shop around for the best deal (e.g. lower basic costs), and take recent recommendations from authors, now that it is quite a common process (at the time I did it, I didn’t know anyone else who had self-published). I would make sure the layout was appropriate, not too condensed. And I would not do it for the money, but for the other things that publication can bring – visibility, the exercise of taking a set of ideas to a polished final format, an easier and more user-friendly way to share information. Next time, however, I might not make a physical book, but an e-book. And that would probably provide a whole new learning opportunity around a publishing process.

I got a great question this morning from a fellow learning practitioner working at the UN in Geneva, asking for ideas about how to structure 20 short participant presentations over a 2-day workshop.

I wrote a blog post last month about using Pecha Kucha’s and Ingnites for this kind of thing (see The End of Boring…), and went on to suggest how to use this in a workshop where people might not have prepared to try a new technique.

Why not let people choose between doing a Pecha Kucha and doing a poster for their 5-minute presentation. Tell them 50% can do one and the other will do the second technique. See if they self-select between the two after an introduction to the techniques.

For the Poster, tell people that they will have a flipchart size sheet, coloured markers/collage materials and their product will be photographed and shown on the big screen as a guide for their 5 minute talk. You can give them a word budget too if you wish – 10 words, 20 words – or you could have them pick a card and the card number gives them their word budget, so they will all be different. That gives them a little more drama, as their Pecha Kucha colleagues will experience.

Then give people time in the workshop to prepare themselves, say a 45 min or 1 hour prep period before the presentations start. And finally, put them into pairs to do this preparation work (even mix them, one poster person with a Pecha Kucha person). This pairing gives them some support and someone to bounce ideas off of, it also gives them a deep dive into someone else’s work, and let’s them experience the other technique they didn’t choose. The one-hour investment in preparation time will be made up through the 5/6 minute presentation time frame (versus the 10-15 min per person they might have expected normally), and provides valuable relationship building time.

After the preparation time, set up the sequencing, let people pick a number between 1-20 out of a hat, which will give them their order. Then schedule them in 5 presentation blocks (that is roughly 45 min, with the transition times). After each of block of 5 presentations, plan on a reflection discussion for 10 minutes – what are people noticing about the presentations? What patterns are emerging, what might that mean for our topic X or Y. Change the questions for this reflection slightly each time for variety, as well as a useful opportunity to help move people’s thinking on your topic. Pull out different things, about one aspect or another, or about what we can do with the new information we are getting (so how it contributes to our action, next steps, or other goal of your workshop.)

For timing within the overall workshop, it depends on what purpose these presentations serve. Are they briefing people on the other participants, on work between a previous meeting and this one, information on the activities of many different offices of members in a network? If so, then it would make sense to start this early, such as after coffee on Day 1 and finish after lunch the same day. Or perhaps it is on commitments ore personal action plans for the results of a longer workshop, in which case you will want that at the end. See when the information given is most useful for the work you are doing. With 20 of these, it would be important to work it around a break, coffee or lunch.

Other interesting presentation-linked techniques that I have seen recently (not linked to the above scenario, but cool anyways – I want to remember them in any case so I put them here!):

Give a “quiz” at the end of the presentations. This would also work for the 20 presentations referred to above. As people present, note down some of the key points, interesting facts, etc. Then at the end of the presentations, to start the discussion, ask the audience the quiz questions. Question by question, ask for the answers from the audience; then if desired, ask the speaker to complement this with (only a little!) additional information. This is also the way to focus the discussion on a certain line of inquiry if that is helpful for your workshop. You can also decide if you want to tell people in advance that there will be a quiz or not. If you do, you might get them to pay more attention to what they are hearing; surprising them will wake them up for the discussion. See what makes sense for the group.

Introducing speakers: Have the audience introduce them. Put up on the screen a photograph of the speakers (with their name and title if you want, or try it without and also ask the audience for their name and title) and walk down into the audience and ask people to introduce this person. Some people will have heard something about them, read an article, or met them, let the audience say a few words about the person and then ask the speaker if there is anything they would like to add. I saw this at the Battle of the Bloggers at Online Educa last year with an audience of about 150 and it worked brilliantly, and in the end the information got out.

What other interesting practice have you seen for making presentations powerful and memorable? What are the ways we can help people with brilliant ideas and thoughts in their heads share them with others in the most productive way?

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2010-05-06 10:58:002016-12-22 15:35:16From One Brain to Many: Can You Creatively Build 20 Presentations Into a Workshop?

Last Friday night I went to a birthday party that a friend of mine threw for herself. It was a nice group size, 10 women, that she had drawn from various of her different social groups. Because of this diversity, everyone knew somebody, but no one knew everyone, except for her. So she decided to play a game, as a way to bring the group together and get conversation going.

At the beginning of the party, in front of the fireplace, we all sat together searching around for things to talk about with one another, work, school, family, our origins – the usual conversation suspects. Going on in parallel, as people came in, my friend would hand them a small piece of paper and a pen and asked them to write something about themselves that was interesting and that the others might not know about them, and give it back to her. The first reaction in almost every case was, but I haven’t done anything interesting! Stumped, people held on to those papers until the very last minute when they would finally write something down and hand it back.

My friend put all the papers aside as we started dinner, and indeed there was one conversation going at one end of the table about school, and another at the top of the table about another topic, and a few people like me in the middle trying to listen to both, but not quite managing to jump in. At that point, getting our attention, our hostess announced that we were going to play our game. She told people that she was going to read one of the statements and that the table would have to guess who had done what. People laughed nervously at first, apologetically restating that they had simply not been able to think of anything very interesting. Then we started, my friend began reading the statements one at a time….and… within minutes we were in an uproar, bursting with laughter, incredulous with disbelief!

This amazing group of people had been all over the world and done remarkable things – someone was being quietly paid to go by train every Friday up to Gstaad one of the world’s poshest ski resorts to teach flute lessons to a couple of students living there (we never found out who they were), one person had competed nationally in Latin Dance competitions and danced in stage shows, another person had a long list of movie stars that she had bumped into (some literally) in New York City and great stories to go along with these, someone else had worked as a forensic DNA research specialist in Costa Rica and mesmerized us with the story of CSI-like drug-related murder that she had worked on and helped solve.

What a completely different conversation we had after that! No more super small talk, there was no going back.

With that small game, not only was the conversation brought together, giving us a shared experience, it also produced an opportunity for us to connect with each person individually, making finding further conversations topics a breeze. We also quickly went to much deeper quality connections, and more memorable ones. I will probably never forget these things I learned about these women, and when I see them next I will be able to reconnect with them in a much different way thanks to this relationship building shortcut. It was a service to social learning too, knowing more about what people do and can do, if anyone asks me for a good music teacher, I know where to send them.

This game also created lots of good energy, and that relaxed people who did not know one another. It helped us share things about ourselves that we are proud of, but that would have never come up in a normal cocktail party conversations (like taking blood samples from dismembered corpses), and gave people a real sense of accomplishment; we all left feeling much more “amazing” than when we arrived. Remarkable what a little social learning exercise can do!

If you want to do it yourself, here are the game instructions:

Materials: Squares of paper (1 per person – make sure they are all the same), pens, a bowl to put them in.

Time: 3-4 minutes per person playing.

Game steps:

As people walk in give them a slip of pepole and ask them individually to write down one thing about themselves that is interesting, and that people in the room may not know about themselves. Don’t give them any examples (they won’t really need them), but you can ask them to think about their past, their home or work life, etc. Tell them NOT to write their name on the paper.

Collect the papers and fold them over; put them in a bowl or hat.

During dinner, or when everyone can listen and see you, announce the game and pull the first paper out of the bowl. Tell the person who wrote it not to announce themselves until someone has guessed, or the group is stumped.

Read the first paper, and start the guessing! When the person has finally been guessed, ask them to talk a little about their experience, ask about context, or for a short story (this is where the good stuff comes) and let the group focus on that person for a time before going on to the next paper.

People will naturally keep track of how many they guessed correctly – if you want you can have a small prize for the person who got the most correct.

Variation: In a workshop setting I use this game just after lunch or on Day 2 or 3, as on the first day if people really don’t know one another at all, they will not be able to guess. If people do know one another somewhat, you can move the game up in the agenda. With a larger group, I mix up and number the cards, and then at the start of the game, I ask people to take out a piece of paper and number it from 1 to 15 (the number of people playing), and I read through all the papers first with no out-loud guessing, simply asking people to write down their guesses. Once I have completed one reading, I go back and read them again in the same order (thus the need for numbering!) and this time, we guess and then move into the wonderful sharing and storytelling as people get to tell more about what they can do and know.

Whether at a birthday dinner or in a workshop, you just never know what a gold mine of experience, stories and knowledge you have with you in the room, until you ask, and then let the evening be naturally taken over to learning about your Amazing Group of People.

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2010-03-13 06:25:002016-12-22 15:35:44An Amazing Group of People: Have a Party, Play a (Social Learning) Game!

Learning can be a useful accelerator for the work you do. It can help keep you motivated, let you experience your progress in a different way, keep you engaged with wider processes. So how can you build more learning into your work life? As a learning practitioner, I asked myself this question, and here is what I came up with:

1. Ask great questionsIt is surprising how many people don’t ask any questions, or only ask rhetorical, obvious or yes/no questions. Try to ask engagement questions that people want to answer, questions that ask people to think and share. Ask questions of yourself (like I just did). For all of your questions, consider how you ask them – an approach like Appreciative Inquiry can help you refine your questioning practice (it even works on yourself).

2. Listen for learningListening is a companion to number 1: How often do you ask yourself as you go into a listening or a conversation opportunity, “What do I want to learn?” Answering this question can help you listen very differently and more deliberately. You can also ask yourself, “How am I listening to this?” This can help you explore your openness to learning at that moment, and to notice when you are most receptive to new ideas and messages (and when you are not).

3. Be a better storytellerStorytelling has so many contributions to make to learning, as we have written about so many times. It helps take you through the process of packaging your learning for better recall and resuse, makes it easier to repeat/retell (thus further embedding it), and makes your learning more useful not only to you, but also to others, as you do the work for them to distill the most meaningful parts of some experience or learning.

4. Start a blog/vlogFor so many reasons, blogs help you be a part of the conversation (even if you are only talking to yourself). They provide an opportunity to notice your experience and a provide a virtual place to record it. Because it’s public, it asks for some quality control (through, say, number 3 above.) Its chronological organization and tagging helps structure your experience, so it can be used as a knowledge management tool. And I personally use it to strengthen my reflective practice, more on this below.

5. Join a community of practiceThese can be physical, virtual or both. They can help you share and be shared with, providing rich opportunities for peer learning. They can be even more useful if you use them to practice some of these other learning tools, like asking great questions, and listening for learning. If you don’t find a community of practice that fits, can you start one? (Ning makes this easy for virtual CoPs.)

6. Practice itFind opportunities to try something again. Maybe you went to a great visual facilitation workshop – how can you continue to practice that even if you are a beginner? As you sit in on a conference call, or in a meeting, can you doodle icons of the conversation process ?

7. Move your learning into a different side of your brainCan you add an image to the theory, or link your learning to a physical experience that makes the point visceral? Can you draw a diagram that explains your thinking in addition to writing a paragraph about it? Can you move your learning from knowledge to behaviour change, from left brain to right?

8. Notice/Map your personal knowledge management system If knowledge is a flow, how are you tracking the flows? What kinds of tools are you using to manage this flow – google is good of course, and what other kind of nets are you throwing out in the ocean of information to help you get the quality of inputs you need when you need them? In effect, what are you using as your personal knowledge management system? For example, do you have a list of the gurus in your field whose blogs or tweets you follow? Do you tag useful incoming content in your gmail or in a delicious account? Can you improve your email management system (e.g. through something like Inbox Zero?) Plenty of opportunities exist in the Web2.0 world of today.

9. Be deliberate about reflectionPeople use different means for this, and generally agree that they are more fully present for learning when they are actively reflecting on their experience. Capture, whatever your tool – journaling, blogging, songwriting, slam poetry – is helpful for many reasons that can be found in the points above. The choices you make about what to record helps to prioritise information, makes it more reusable and, depending on your tool, makes it available on demand for both yourself and others.

10. Help other people learnIn addition to the obvious social value of this, learning through teaching (with a small “t”, thus not necessaily in a formal learning setting) is a well known way to embed learning. How can you volunteer your learning to others and in doing so practice and progress your own? Every conversation is an opportunity to exchange, so you don’t need to have a classroom environment to help other people learn.

11. Know your own learning preferences There are of course diagnostics around this, and I think one of the simplest ways to identify your learning preferences is to ask yourself some questions (and voila we’re back to point 1): “When was the last time I learned something new? What were the conditions that helped me learn? What was I doing? What were the people around me doing to help me learn? In what situations do I learn the best?”

Learning happens continually, and still there are always opportunities to integrate it more powerfully into personal practice and team practice, even without a training budget. For example, just writing this blog post gave me an opportunity for learning, which combined many of the above. Once you get out of the formal learning environment it’s free for the most part, it’s relatively easy, and still, it takes a little thought, and perhaps a change in daily practice. The rewards, however, can be great – a boost in productivity, satisfaction, direct engagement with your topic, as well as an opportunity to strengthen yourself as a practitioner and further increase the value of your contribution to your community(ies) of choice.

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2009-11-26 03:36:002016-12-22 15:35:4511 Ways to Build More Learning Into Your Work Life

Many of us go to hours, days, even weeks of meetings and workshops as a part of our working life. Then when we return home have the added pleasure of trying to remember what happened and what we agreed to do.

Thankfully many of us also have developed good systems for tracking our next actions (I’m happy with my GTD practice, which 2 years after adopting is still going strong), and of course we also rely on the organizers to send out a report which further reminds us what happened and what’s next. These reports take many forms, and a good one is one that we a) actually read, that b) keeps the interest/excitement/momentum of the hours/days everyone spent together, and c) encourges follow-up on our part.

With the flurry of meetings and workshops that most people experience as part of their work process, how can you make your own event memorable? What can you add during and after the event that makes it stand out and finds a little home in the grey matter of each participant for the duration of your collaborative work?

Helping people remember is something that can be built into a workshop process. Like the deliberate process of creating a story from an experience – it helps people to organize and contextualise information, distill its meaning, reorganize it into a lean narrative, and create a product (story) with title or tag that is easier to remember and reuse later.

You can of course, literally, ask people to create stories from their experiences at the end of a workshop, and practice telling each other these stories and notice the great ones (people can always share and use each other’s stories). You can also use techniques like some we saw at the Society for Organizational Learning conference last year, which had “Weavers” (two charismatic people who opened and closed each day, Sonny and Cher style), who effectively linked or wove together what was going on in the conference into funny stories and jokes -again contextualising the information and applying it to real life in a humorous way. They created and told the stories for us in that case.

That conference also had a Slam Poet duo – Tim Merry and Marc Durkee – who by the end of each day had written a rap-like song, with guitar accompaniement, which pulled out a few of the strongest points from the day’s plenary presentations and built them into a strong refrain. To get big messages to stick, they even had a sing-along component. You can’t get much more memorable than that (600 people singing along to the key messages over and over again).

Visual facilitation and graphic recording are two practices that also help to create icons and memory triggers for participants, not to mention helping information and data creep over from our rational left to the creative right side of the brain (more brain real estate cannot be bad). The image above (of me!) was created in a recent workshop by Fiami, a Geneva-based graphic recorder and visual facilitator, who worked at the back of our room to capture the essence of the discussion in one pane images which are informed by his work in “bandes-dessinees” (which translates (poorly) into comic strips). His work creating one frame images with captions is slightly different than the main-stream graphic interpretations by visual facilitation groups such as Bigger Picture, a Danish group with which we have also had the pleasure to work.

Bigger Picture, like many of the visual facilitators who work in the tradition of David Sibbet and The Grove (often credited with first bringing strong visuals into planning and strategy processes), capture the process in murals which visually track the progress, decision, discussions of the group in real time. With this approach, at the end of the workshop, you have a large graphic artifact (literally meters of interconnected drawing) which ultimately can be reproduced as a poster for each participant if you have the budget (they are not cheap). These mural creation processes, which do go on quietly at the back of the room during your meeting, have the most impact if some time is built into the agenda for participants to interact with the visual – validate it, add their own post-its of icons and meaningful words here and there, and reflect on some of the key messages. With these visual “fingerprints” of participants embedded within it, the final visual’s utility as an aide memoire is greatly enhanced.

The number of groups around the world working in visual facilitation is growing. Many of these practitioners are connected through networks like the International Forum of Visual Facilitators and vizthink which operate globally, the latter of which includes all kinds of applied visual techniques.

Whatever you do (come up with your own!) you can increase your chances of success, longevity of ideas, and active follow-up to your workshop by being more memorable for participants. It might feel a bit risky at first, but my experience has been that participants are most thankful for the extra help making their time spent with you in the workshop more actionable.

Last night I participated in an excellent webinar run by Chief Learning Officer Magazine called “Metrics of the Modern CLO: Measuring Formal and Informal Learning“.

(CLO offers a great series of free learning webinars, by the way, see the archived version of this webinar here.)

The speaker was Josh Bersin, and he spoke about three kinds of workplace informal learning and how to measure them:

1) On-Demand Learning2) Social Learning, and3) Embedded Learning

He said businesses report that informal learning gives the greatest business value, with 72% of learning coming from on-the-job experience (stretch assigments, etc); on-the-job mentoring/projects/rotations; and coaching and peer learning. Only some 28% comes from formal training. He noted that informal learning was not fad, it was an evolution in workplace learning. Yet only 1/3 of organizations have learning and development programmes that reflect future talent needs (and that is in the private sector, I wonder what the percentage is in the other sectors – higher? lower?)

This morning I woke up thinking about the third kind of informal learning. I am not used to seeing or hearing the words “embedded learning” and I needed a way to remember this, and here is the learning anecdote I came up with.

Embedded Learning is the invisible learning on the job, feedback from managers, performance support from mentors and peers, and so on. It helps you on the job to learn as you go, in the context of your working community, rather than noticing something you need to learn and then going out to search for it yourself (this is on-demand learning).

From June I started working from home. So that is my workplace, and at the moment I work primarily alone. Of course I have many virtual partners, and occasionally meetings in my home office. However, one person I do see weekly during my working day is the nice lady who comes in to help for a few hours. She just started just over a month ago, and we already appreciate her as a masterful mentor in her approach to family order.

The first week she was here, the house was a jumble, and when she left the house was perfect. Everything that had been out on any flat surface was gone. Some things are still not found (library book, football socks, telephone list). The second week, it happened again. The third week, again, although slightly less was exposed. After a few weeks I noticed that just a few days prior to her arrival, things started to get put away. Now, the day before she arrives, everyone reminds one another of her imminent arrival. And like magic, order gets restored even before she comes. She set us on this learning pathway and it is working through embedded learning.

This woman is a household manager and she is clearly giving us feedback. When she doesn’t like where something is, she shows us what she wants by putting it where it belongs (in her estimation). She models the kind of (workplace in my case) environment she wants us to maintain. It’s happening over time, and she is helping us make the change ourselves. This is embedded learning. There is no job aid or checklist on how to maintain this productive learning/working environment (on-demand learning) or no wiki where we are writing down where we are putting things (social learning). Although both of these kinds of learning might also be useful in the future.

Today when my husband left the house he reminded me very seriously that it was Friday (implicitly, anything you don’t want to disappear needs to be moved now) – and this from someone who has not traditionally noticed anything below 1 meter. The mere mention of her name and my 8-year old is scouring his bedroom floor for precious items. This order mentor and household coach has been like magic. She has embedded new practices at the smallest unit of organization, although not through formal training, or setting formal systems into place. If she stays long enough, dare I say, this might be permanent; and eventually she could leave quietly and move to another family, like Mary Poppins, her work done.

Once you start to think about it, you might notice embedded learning in other places around you. Today’s high turnover in organizations might provide an opportunity for embedded-learning spotting. In a workplace where someone has moved on, you might notice habits and practices that have changed as a result of someone’s influence, coaching, modelling, mentoring. That is, if they happened to be in tune with embedding learning, overtly or not (I am not sure the nice lady in my house is actively thinking about her household learning programme, although I may be wrong about that.) Not everyone operates that way of course.

How you get people to operate like that is one of the keys to a learning organization. Then people can move in and out, and the learning is embedded, it stays and just keeps building and growing.

Even if it is not the original person, with successful embedded learning, someone keeps making the bed.

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2009-10-09 04:39:002016-12-22 15:35:45Embedded Learning and Making the Bed

I wrote a post in March about learning through repetition, versus intense bursts of learning – so the benefits of 15 minutes of Spanish a day for 2 years versus the same amount of time in a one-month intensive each summer. This apparently deepens your neural grooves and helps you really learn something (See para 2 of Golden Nuggets from the GTD Summit – notice also Michael Randel’s comments about the timing piece).

Well, I checked that recently when I did two things that I have not done for over 25 years. I picked up my silver Stradivarius Bach trumpet and played a high school fight song, and caught four nice largemouth bass on a rooster tail spinner (albeit not at the same sitting, or standing, as it were).

I had no idea that this intrinsic knowledge was still there. It made me wonder what else there is still sitting in there waiting to be used, or re-used?

Indeed, 25 years ago, I played my trumpet nearly every day over a seven year period. I was in the marching band, orchestra and in a jazz band. I even got to leave school from time to time to play taps for military funerals in our small town. (Because I was paid for this I got a lifetime of confounding responses to the workshop icebreaker game “2 Truths and a Lie” -no one ever believes that I was a Professional Trumpet Player – it almost made standing in the snow behind a tombstone half a mile upwind from a 21 gun salute worthwhile.)

I probably played that particular fight song thousands of times. Any one Friday night football game, win or lose, would have produced dozens of opportunities to do so, not to mention the practice drills, and the end of every single, daily 45 minute band practice. I picked up the music for that song two weeks ago, looked through it and played it without hesitation, the second time from memory. My kids were amazed, they couldn’t even get a non-frog sound out of the instrument and they’d never seen me and a trumpet in the same room together.

Bass fishing was a similar experience. Over the years I have had a few opportunities to drop a worm on a hook into a farm pond and pull up a few bluegills. However, casting for large mouth bass with a spinner takes a little more than watching the bobber go under in shallow water and pulling up the fish. Although I found bass fishing again – getting the lure just where you want it and reeling in at the right pace – after decades of not casting, nearly as easy as that. I could even strike so that the bass were lip caught and could be happily released instead of having to practically surgically extract the hook, which never bodes well for their continued longevity as anything other than turtle bait.

Fish filleting also came with the memory package (the bluegills my boys caught), as I got to bring back those specific skills to create lunch. This was not like buying fish in the supermarket and taking off the skin, this was like taking the shiny excited fish out of the bucket of water and making it into tiny lunchable boneless, skinless filets. Something that as I get older and perhaps more sympathetic to vegetarianism, I find harder mentally to do, although I could do it almost mechanically and of course did it all the time without hesitation when I was younger and living in a rural community.

It seemed so easy, it took so little time and those abilities were back. It made me want to remember what else I have really learned in the past, perhaps long forgotten, that I could bring into service now. And somehow reapply – my guess is that trumpet playing and bass fishing might be hard to integrate into my current line of work. Although if one of my goals was to meet some new people in my local area, and perhaps work more at the community level, I can assure you that I never thought of joining the fanfare (local village bands notorious in Switzerland for playing long sets after speeches at national celebrations, and before the drinking starts.) But maybe I should.

And I’m sure that I could come up with multiple parallels between bass fishing and leadership learning if I tried, it might make for some good learning anecdotes – at least for me.

A week or so ago (time marker), I spent the day in London (place marker) with Shawn Callahan from Anecdote, an innovative storytelling group from Australia, in a full day learning session called “Storytelling for business leaders”.

Let’s say I wanted to tell you about my day. I could write down a list of things I learned, but that wouldn’t be a story. I could give you my opinion of the day, but that wouldn’t be a story either. If I was going to tell you a story about that day, I would need to start with a time, date or place marker, add an unanticipated event, and even more importantly, I would have to have a point – the reason for the story. (This might sound obvious, but if you think about it, how many so-called stories do you hear where the point is far from clear? )

Why do we need a point? In our workshop we talked about this. Stories aren’t just for entertainment; they give us a repertoire of captured patterns. And matching patterns (e.g. our past experience, with a new situation) can help us with decision-making (see Gary Klein on naturalistic decision-making). Having a strong point, not only helps your listener tag your story, but helps you do it too, so that it is easier to remember and therefore more meaningful, which makes it easier to use the information and learning in the future.

This point was made for me experientially by a sequence of activities that followed in the afternoon of our workshop. We were asked to craft and tell a story to a partner who would then reflect back to the storyteller what their story told them about that person. We told the first iteration of our stories. Then we were given some tips for improving our story – making it human, keeping it simple, using the unexpected, making it concrete and credible – and we saw some amazing YouTube video examples of storytelling, from Geena Davis at the Golden Globes to Obama “Fired up and ready to go” on the electoral trail. Then we were asked to work on and tell the same story again, better this time.

I worked on my story, based on a recent experience about learning from mistakes, tried to make it more concrete, and brought in some of the real life drama and emotion of the situation. Then I retold it. And in the feedback discussion the same thing happened – my partner told me as my previous partner had, that he enjoyed it, gave me plenty of reasons for liking it, and then asked me gently – what was my point?

Slightly crushed, I asked myself – what was my point? It’s not enough to be an impressionistic storyteller – I had a general feeling of where I was going. But how do you get there? Do you need a point first and then find a story – or do you have a great story and massage it to make a point? Either way, I was clearly missing it. Even with an entertaining narrative. This is the real art of storytelling.

I need to go back and rework it; that story has potential, and must always remember to ask myself before I start to tell a story – what’s my point? I said that many storytellers we hear are rather unclear as to the purpose of their stories. I might have been one of those perpetrators in the past – are you? If so, help people learn more from you, and you from yourself, by upping your game in storytelling.

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2009-07-05 08:25:002016-12-22 15:35:46My Point? To Be a “Story” There Must Be a Point

This week we went to a meeting of a Swiss-based Knowledge Management Community of Practice called “Think Table”. This one-day gathering was packed full of games, experiences, discussions on topics such as storytelling (Story Guide: Building Bridges Using Narrative Techniques” prepared by the Swiss Development Cooperation-their webpage has many other related free documents to download), facilitation (our contribution), monitoring and evaluation for knowledge management, and “rapid prototyping”.

Rapid prototyping was a particularly interesting tool, and it fit in with our recent preoccupation with getting people at work to be thinking about their Learning Cycles. This tool presents an opportunity to go further with the experimenting/experience part of the cycle through actually building a process and then simulating and walking through the various steps, before documenting them more formally on paper after the experience.

Manfred Kunzel from the University of Fribourg presented the activity, asking four small teams to each construct the following scenario: “opening the door to sell black ThinkTables to schools in our community”. He gave us each half a box of supplies, small blocks, game pieces, sticks, post-it notes, other representational objects, and instructed us to build and then simulate the various seps in the process. After our initial “what?” reaction, we got to the task, and the discussion which followed helped us move through the essential stages of both project planning and execution (simplify the task, organization and set up, exploration and modelling, develop the plan, and execution). Apparently you can build any process in about 40 minutes, although then it can take several hours afterwards to formalise the process (map it, write down the steps, assign roles, etc.)

I have one of the boxes on my desk now, and already have plans to use it (you could probably create your own box). I thought it was a brilliant way to get people to think about something they want to do together, agree on it, build it, and then practice how the various stocks (money, people, ideas) flow around their system. It doesn’t replace real life, but sometimes you can’t practice building a bridge, or running a Congress of 10,000 people. At least this way you can create that environment on a much smaller scale and then run around in your simulated environment, saying what you would say, going where you would go, and seeing what kinds of things you might run into on the way.

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2007-06-02 06:05:002016-12-22 15:36:12Experience in a Box?

In the next few days no doubt we will be writing a lot about a recent meeting we held on “Exploring Deep Change Processes: Learning from Around the World”. As I work through my reflections, I thought I would start with the discussion about how much choice we really have about how we see our own past, present and future.

One of our speakers was Ulrich Goluke, from blue-way, who is a scenarios and systems practitioner. He urged us to think about the future in a deliberate way and to have the courage to choose and develop for ourselves a set of possible scenarios for our futures. He prefaced his contribution with a short game, described below:

In pairs, take two minutes each to tell the story of your life to your partner as though it was a heroic one.

In the same pairs, take two minutes each to tell the story of your life to your partner as though you were a victim.

For many of the participants, this exercise was a “Wow” (we collected “wows” at the end of the workshop.) Why did this short exercise mean so much to people? It was incredible that with the one data set (our lives) we could frame the same sequence of life experiences so convincingly and so truthfully as both a heroic endeavour, and as a victim. Where one moment we were proud of where we were and our future, and four minutes later, we lamented the fact that we had only come this far due to events that kept us from living to our full potential.

This really showed how much choice we have in how we project ourselves into the world in the present and in the future; how we tell ourselves stories that can either celebrate a life, or despair it. Ultimately, we can choose the story we want to tell, and it can lift us up, or bring us down. It’s our choice…

If you read the blog post on 19 October, this title will sound familiar. That blog post was inspired by a discussion with a few colleagues after a staff meeting. Some ideas were already popping up on how these kinds of gatherings could be even more interesting and contribute to good dialogue within the institution. We decided to take this a step further and use our own communications unit meeting to generate additional creative ideas, and then to share them with the team who is responsible for our staff meetings. We imagine that these ideas will be read with as much enthusiasm as produced them!

Here was our question: You just went to a great staff meeting – you left excited, energised and hopeful. Tell us – what happened?We first worked in pairs to create our stories, then shared them with each other. Here are some of the ideas that emerged:

Facilitation• The staff meeting has changing chairs/facilitators – sometimes the DG, sometimes other management, or staff members lead the meeting.• A different programme/unit hosts each staff meeting and uses it as a creative event. They use visuals (ppt or video with little text) as people enter the room to promote or update people on their programme. They run a warm-up, facilitate the news and reporting, and use a few minutes of the time for an “ad-break” on their programme. We give an award to the best staff meeting of the year at the Christmas party (people vote for it). Sometimes departments partner to put on their staff meeting so as to encourage cross-department collaboration.

Format of the meeting• At the beginning of each staff meeting there is a 5-minute warm up to get people’s attention (breathing, tai chi, something fun etc.)• The free coffee morning is changed to right after the staff meeting to encourage people to talk about the meeting and what they heard.• There are different formats using interactive exercises for discussion components. For example, people make one minute interventions and then go into different corners of the room and invite people to discuss further, so they are “opt-in” discussions.• Creative sharing is promoted in the staff meetings, and discussions are held that generate ideas about things of interest to staff, that explore a major issue, or use voting for more inputs by staff.

Reporting and updates• Reports are not always made by the Heads; other staff members also get to report.• Reporting uses more visuals, including “advertisements” of new products of which we are proud. Little text is used in the visuals, and more emphasis is put on pictures, cartoons and things to remember.• Reports are delivered as if they were news items – answering the question, “What’s attractive for people? What is newsworthy?”• The reports have a limit of 2 minutes (some people say 1 minute!) and a bell or a timer goes off when the time is up.• The reports are interesting, humorous, engaging – the audience “votes” at the end of a report by clapping and that instant feedback incentivises the staff reporting.• In reports, some parameters are set – such as that people cannot talk about “where, when or who”, only about “what they have learned and the key messages to staff.” Reports are forward looking and not backward looking, giving staff an idea of what we want to achieve and inviting engagement and discussion.• Not only technical people take the lead; we also hear from general management, finance, cafeteria, etc. We consider what is interesting to ALL the staff.

Updates on non-programme and non-work activities• Staff share what is going on in management – using the meeting to achieve even greater transparency on current debates in management.• Space is given to support staff to share their news items.• An “open-mike” system is used to allow people to share their news.• Each staff meeting includes both work-related reports and also updates on people’s lives: births, announcements, weddings, etc.• Staff meetings include 5 minutes at the end on social aspects such as how to make life exciting in our area (local events, announcements etc.)

Certainly there are great staff meetings in other institutions, what other experiences are out there? Even this 20 minute creative exercise was an example of how a staff meeting can give energy and contribute to our learning about how to do things differently.

https://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.png00Gillianhttps://brightgreenlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download.pngGillian2006-11-06 00:40:002016-12-22 15:36:14Using Storytelling to Generate Ideas: We Just Went to a Great Staff Meeting – What Happened?

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